Mike Isaac

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LinkedIn Shuts Down “Bang With Professionals” Hook-Up App

It’s not like they didn’t see it coming.

Not more than a week after launching a beta version of an app, LinkedIn is revoking its API access to social hook-up app “Bang With Professionals,” a site which aimed to connect potential, uh, lovers, using LinkedIn’s professional network.

“We all knew it was only a matter of time before our API key was revoked. Well, it just was!” the founders of the site wrote on its landing page on Friday morning.

The company — if you can call two people who slapped together a beta app over three days a “company” — made sure to note that users who signed up shouldn’t be worried about their data. “Don’t worry, your data was safe all along,” the founders wrote. “We just deleted all of the user ids and the only thing that will be left is this landing page.”

It was sort of an inevitability, as the founders — who continue to remain anonymous — acknowledge. As LinkedIn states, “We believe this developer and application are in violation of our LinkedIn Developer TOS as they are using our APIs in a manner that are inconsistent with the goals of our Developer Program,” the company told AllThingsD in a statement. “As a result we have disabled their access to the LinkedIn APIs.”

In particular, the app violated Section III, part A.2.C of LinkedIn’s developer terms of service, which explicitly prohibits the promotion of “adult activities.” (In other words, no “banging,” please.)

But it sounds like there’s no real bad blood here. The site came to a fruition “as a joke,” no doubt spurred by the rise of “Bang With Friends,” the app that connects people willing to participate in one-night stands using Facebook’s social network and API. (Though as of Friday, that site is still up and running.)

“We’d like everyone to know we were just having a good time testing technologies and seeing how far it could go before we would be revoked,” Kate Doe, one of the folks working on the app, told me in an email. “We’ll probably sell the domain to whoever wants to pay for it. Maybe recovering our 57 dollars in the process.”

In a time where larger social companies like Facebook and Twitter are often publicly on the outs with their respective developer networks, it’s sort of nice to see an amicable ending to what amounted to a goof in good fun.

Oh, and my condolences to those business types eager to have used the app for a quick co-worker fling. There’s always the water cooler.

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